From Sacramento, Hubert Buel had a successful career as an animator for Walt Disney, teacher at Long Beach College, and with the San Francisco Chronicle, which he joined in 1938 and after World War II, served as Art Director. His amusing illustration, The Wonderful World of Animals, was nationally syndicated.

As a fine-art painter, he had a specialty of watercolor, and he won his first painting award at age nine at the Fresno County Fair. He graduated from UCLA and did post-graduate work at UC-Berkeley, Mills College, University of Southern California, and Fresno State College.

On Chronicle assignments, he painted throughout the United States, Europe, and in the Pacific, he did a series of paintings including views of Bora Bora and Tahiti. During World War II, he was a naval officer in the Pacific and did a number of watercolors of military encounters. He continued to paint, mostly on location, until shortly before his death on May 16, 1984 in San Francisco.

Source:
Edan Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940

Hubert Buel (1915-1984)...Born: Sacramento, CA

Studied: Fresno State College (California), University of California (Los Angeles

Member: California Water Color Society.

Hubert Buel was born and raised in central California. In the early 1930s, he studied watercolor painting with Alexandra Bradshaw at Fresno State College then continued his art education at the University of California, Los Angeles. He worked briefly at the Walt Disney Studios and taught at Long Beach City College until 1940.

During World War 11, he served as a United States Naval Officer in the South Pacific. He took painting supplies with him and produced a number of watercolors depicting island life and military involvement. After the war, he worked at Twentieth Century-Fox Studios as a set designer and then took a permanent job as art director at the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper.

Buel was a prolific watercolorist for fifty years. He often selected Bay Area subject matter near his home in San Francisco, but also painted in Hawaii, Mexico and Europe. The majority of his works were produced on location and were painted with transparent watercolors. He was a founding member of the West Coast Watercolor Society and became president of that organization in 1974.

Biographical information:

Biography provided courtesy of California Watercolors 1850-1970, By Gordon T. McClelland and Jay T. Last. Interview with Hubert Buel, 1983

Artist whose drawings appear in the Camp Roberts Parade, 1950/51. Repro: “Drawing of soldiers and barracks,” CRParade, Nov. 16, 1950, p. 2; following issues of CRParade have many small drawings in them, unsigned, but stylistically resembling Buel’s work. [The well known artist Hubert Buel (often misnamed by the newspapers Herbert Buel) served in the Navy in WWII and in 1951 was a staff artist for a San Francisco newspaper.] Buel, Hubert (notices in newspapers on newspapers.com and genealogybank.com and the Internet) Both “Herbert Buel” and “Hubert Buel” have many notices on him/them in newspapers on newspapers.com but they were not itemized here; repro: “Stalin,” in San Francisco Chronicle, March 6, 1953, p. 1; one of several Mill Valley artists whose sketches were on display in the children’s section of the Mill Valley Public Library, per Daily Independent Journal (San Rafael, Ca.), Nov. 12, 1955, p. 7; illustrator of several books listed on the Internet including The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek. See books: “Buel, Hubert,” in Nancy Moure, PSCA 1-10; and Nancy Moure, PSCA 11/12.